Welcome to the first edition of The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices. Just a quick bit of housekeeping to help find your way around!

This is a write-up of one of our Publisher Newsletter Summit sessions - the podcast starts back next week. It’s in full below, so no need to click away anywhere.

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What can we learn from award-winning newsletters?

Newsletters have undergone an epic transformation in recent times, developing from simple bulletins to a vital part of the publisher-reader relationship. There is both a science and an art to creating an engaging newsletter that ‘cuts through the noise’, and crucially, building a loyal audience to read it.  

At the 2024 Publisher Newsletter Summit, we spoke to four winners from last year’s Publisher Newsletter Awards – Lauren Indvik (Fashion Matters, FT), Anders Swaffield (Mensa, Think), Jillian MacMath (WalesOnline) and Jem Collins (Journo Resources). They shared tips, lessons learned and the magic that takes a newsletter from good to great.

1: You need a balance of hard AND soft data

As anyone in publishing who has done a customer survey knows, there is often a difference between what the readers say they want, and what they actually read. This is a particularly tough balance for Think, which publishes a weekly newsletter (and monthly magazine) on behalf of the Mensa community. Anders Swaffield describes the ‘Mensans’ as a highly discerning and intelligent readership that has, “an opinion about pretty much everything we’re doing”. 

“The challenge comes from listening to them and helping build a community as a membership organisation – and having the data to back up our decisions. They will tell us they want one thing, but when we run or test it, and it doesn’t get really engaging rates,” he said.  

“So although we will take the reader’s and Mensa’s ideas on board, we ultimately trust and learn from the data, how people are engaging with emails, what they’re doing once they get to the site. Often, how we think they’re engaging is probably not how they actually are engaging.”

For Jem at Journo Resources, readers surveys have been an important supplement to the hard data they collate. “We obviously look at what people are clicking, where we’re signposting, and infer what’s valuable from that. But we also gather softer data through our survey,” she said. “We ask people what value they get from the newsletter – has it given them confidence? Do they feel like they’ve found a community? It’s about having a mix of what people are clicking, but also understanding why they’re there.”

2: Get personal…and personalised

If this year’s Newsletter Awards winners are anything to go by, when it comes to genuine audience engagement, personality-led newsletters are the future. 

WalesOnline’s recently launched Will Hayward newsletter tackles Welsh politics, an underserved topic historically, but one with a highly engaged audience. “Welsh politics has become a very vocal segment for us,” said Jillian. “Having a recognisable person who is engaged with the topic means readers are always feeding back their opinions.” 

There doesn’t need to be a headshot on your masthead for it to work, however. The Journo Resources newsletter, which provides links to journalism jobs across the UK, is written between the small team – so although there is no one figurehead, keeping it ‘human’ provides a memorable touchpoint for readers.

“Newsletters are a personal medium, and we make the most of that with every part of our newsletter. It is often ‘just’ a list of job recommendations, but all of those are hand-picked and hand-written, so that people feel it is personal,” said Jem. 

“It also comes back to our ethical values – if companies don’t list a salary on their jobs, then they can’t advertise with us. It was deciding what’s important to our audience, and they want to know if applying for something is worth their time. That has given them a lot of trust and faith in us.”

Having a ‘champion’ for each of their 20 newsletters has been crucial for two-way engagement with Wales Online’s readers. “From day one, we’ve made sure that each newsletter has a champion in the office, keeping an eye out for content coming in and being written, and then working with me to look at the stats and make sure it’s the right mix for that audience,” said Jillian. 

3: Do your audience a favour – tailor and focus your content

It may sound obvious, but there are still plenty of newsletters out there that neglect to consider the most important factor when it comes to attracting readers – creating content that they actually want to read…rather than what you want to tell them.

When FT considered launching Fashion Matters with Lauren Indvik at the helm, it was unclear whether there would be an audience – but it has proven to be a hit with readers. “Fashion, as you can imagine, is not a core FT topic, so we did testing – we had to know that there was an existing audience within the subscriber base,” said Lauren. 

“My readers know the luxury and fashion brands, and want to know why certain brands are doing well, why others aren’t. So I try to focus on the news stories that week, and help people understand them contextually. I’m really excited when someone who’s not that interested in fashion said they became interested in the fashion business through the newsletter, or they’re using sort of those insights to adapt to their own industry.”

The challenge for Journo Resources is that the team is small – only one person works full-time – but the demographic is diverse. “We know that there are maybe five different types of demographic, but we don’t have the resource to put together five newsletters, so we have had to segment up one newsletter,” said Jem. “We try and make sure that we split it up so that each reader can just skip to the bit that is relevant to them. We know from the click through rates that that it works.”

Though operating as part of a much bigger team, Jillian MacMath agrees that quality is better than quantity. “Four years ago, when Wales Online really started focusing on newsletters as a strategy to drive audience and page views, we thought, ‘how can we create as many as possible, write about every single subject and attract every single possible audience?’ We realised very quickly that that’s not the goal. Focus on writing the best content for your newsletter, good quality stuff to draw people in and then retain that audience once you get them.”

4: Audience retention for the win

It’s too easy to focus on the obvious prize – adding to your reader figures week after week. But as with all aspects of publishing, our panellists said, keeping your existing audiences is – or at least should be – the most important goal.

Jillian MacMath explained: “If you’ve tried to promote your newsletter in a new way, and you’ve got a big chunk of new subscribers who came from that particular promotion, brilliant. But if you’re consistently losing subscribers, seeing a lot of churn on your list, you’re obviously not delivering on what people subscribed to you for in the first place.”

For the Mensa newsletter, Anders Swaffield and his team need to create a delicate balance between acting on the data and delivering on what their human readers actually want: “We need to trust the data, but ultimately if we aren’t doing exactly what the Mensans want us to do, they’re probably not going to open the next newsletter,” he said. 

With Fashion Matters, the relationships built up through audience retention often drives the content strategy.  “For us, it’s not about new audiences. It’s about deepening engagement with the audiences we have,” Lauren said. “I recently wrote a piece about ‘quiet luxury’, and almost all the insights I got when I was writing the article – people hiding their Rolexes, flipping the insides of their Dior bags – came from our newsletter audience. I can’t emphasise enough how important is to actually get on the phone or grab a coffee with readers, because that feedback just completely informs what I’m doing.”

Key takeaways from the award-winners

Each panellist was asked: ‘What’s the most important lesson you’d like all newsletter publishers to know?’

Anders: “Test every single newsletter you send. It doesn’t have to be the subject line; it can be something like whether the title appears above the image. We recently changed the font size of a call-to-action button from 14pt to 18pt, and it increased unique clicks by 20%.”

Jem: “Remember that people are selfish. Whatever you’re doing – whether that’s changing the way the newsletter looks, what event you’re going to signpost to – focus on exactly what people are going to get out of it, a real tangible benefit.”

Jillian: “Don’t be afraid to change things. Newsletters really are a long game; you’ve got to test and adapt and be ready to be agile. After the pandemic, we changed our Covid-focused newsletter to a general health newsletter, and although we were biting our nails worried that no one would read it, there was a real, genuine interest in it.”

Lauren: “Foster dialogue. So many newsletters say, ‘tell us what you think’, but when you reply, you get a two-word response – they don’t actually care what you think. I find that disappointing and a missed opportunity to engage.”

Joanna Cummings is a freelance writer and editor, writing for companies such as FIPP, Mensa and a variety of scientific publications. She is Editorial Director of The Grub Street Journal, “the magazine for magazine people”, and was shortlisted for Editors’ Editor at this year’s BSME Awards.

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